| Quote from: Bob |
Giganews traffic will have very low priority on the network as they carry binary newsgroups. This will make access to their site and NNTP servers very slow at times.
Metronet outsource their news service to Giganews anyway. The only difference between the service you're getting at the moment and Metronet's service is the fact that we rate-limit traffic to 2 x 128kbps feeds. You'd not notice this if you're only using the service for text though.
Text-only services have priority on our network so you may well be better going with one of these. news.individual.net tends to come quite highly recommended.
Did you try Motzarella as that's free?
I can see if I can get you access to the PlusNet text server if you'd like?
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Hi Bob, thanks for looking into all this for me and offering alternatives. What I still don't understand though, is I am only trying to read and sometimes post to two
text only newsgroups uk.rec.cars.maintenance and uk.tech.broadcast and always at the most difficult times they become impossible to read. Both news.metronet.co.uk and the giganews server at the same time. However, if I connect using a dialup connection (Freeserve) at that time, I can access Giganews ok. I can't try news.metronet.co.uk as it can't be accessed from another ISP. If I then reconnect to Metronet broadband, the giganews server is incredibly slow again, so proving the restriction is via Metronet. I cannot understand how it can restrict the bandwidth so much that even a few bytes of plain text cannot be accessed.
Having said all that, its all been working much better recently, but I still expect it to become difficult again at some point. Thanks for the offer about changing to plusnet's news server. I'll stick with metronet's news server for now as it seems to be working ok and I'm a little bit worried about changing anything as my overall connection works nicely these days. I know it shouldn't alter anything, but I'd rather leave well alone for now. Thanks for the info about individual.net. I may go to that and drop the Giganews server as it rather pricey.
Regards
Howard
